Naming names and making money on the Net

Tuesday

Apr 27, 2010 at 2:00 AM

Not too long ago, experts thought that English would one day grow to become the international language, imagining that the influence and prominence of business superpowers would directly influence language trends in their regions.

Not too long ago, experts thought that English would one day grow to become the international language, imagining that the influence and prominence of business superpowers would directly influence language trends in their regions.

The idea was simple enough: As the economy goes, so goes the language, and if things had worked out as expected, American English would have made significant inroads into Mexico and Central America, British English would dominate Europe and the Mediterranean, and Australian English would have influenced Asia.

Instead, English is on the decline worldwide, with fewer than 6 percent of the world's population speaking it as a first language, and each year, fewer still choose it as their second language. That being the case, is it really any surprise that the Internet — a worldwide communication and media network that started out as strictly English — is now following the trend away from that language?

The website of Internet World Stats — www.internetworldstats.com — shows that, as of Dec. 31, 2009, only 14.4 percent of the Internet's user base is from North America. Collectively, the total user base from native English-speaking countries is under 20 percent — roughly a fifth the world's population of Internet users. The remaining 80 percent is largely split between two easy-to-grasp groups — Asia (42 percent), and Europe (23 percent) — with the rest of the world making up the remaining 15 percent.

Is it any wonder then that ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is finally taking steps to correct the imbalance of accessibility for the Internet? Actually, they have been working on this for quite a while, starting in 2000, and beginning their first tests in 2007, but it was not until last November that ICANN announced that countries can now apply for website domain names and TLDs (top-level domains) in non-Roman characters!

Back in 2007, when ICANN first began to test the process, domain names could be registered in non-Roman characters, but the TLD (.com and .net for example) still had to be in Roman characters. The much-anticipated change to the policy last November is very significant, and the world was ready for it: Countries like Russia, China, and Israel were standing in line to file requests for top-level domains in Cyrillic, Chinese, and Hebrew, respectively. By doing so, they — and ICANN — ushered in the dawn of a new era of international domain names for the Internet.

To put this in perspective, last year, Asia had a population of roughly 3.8 billion people, and a Net population of around 764 million, which gives it an Internet penetration of 21 percent of its population.

That is an increase of 568 percent from 2000 statistics, but those numbers only tell part of the story.

Less than 1 percent of the population in China speaks English.

That means that the bulk of the population was hindered from accessing the Web, including websites with content written in their own language.

Considering that the population of China is estimated at more than 1.3 billion, that is a lot of disenfranchised users — and a huge potential audience and market for businesses that can now communicate directly with them, in their own language.

Adding support for other languages is not the only change on the schedule over at ICANN. What would you think of having your own personalized top-level domain? Though companies have been requesting custom TLDs ever since the commercial Internet explosion in the 1990s, the policy was clear: No new TLDs could be registered, and certainly not what amounts to vanity domains. Since then, things have changed and custom options are now on the menu.

It sounds like a boon for big business. Ford Motor Company can have a website — www.mustang.ford — that allows the consumer to go directly to the information that they want. And it is not simply the corporate culture and consumers that will be served by this change in policy. Entire industries, regions, and causes will benefit, too.

Al Gore, for instance, has been calling for a dot-eco domain since last July, allowing environmental websites to use that top-level domain.

You can read the former vice president's entire press release on www.supportdoteco.com, but that might have you wondering why anyone would need a website to promote a new TLD if ICANN is making them available to anyone who wants one?

The answer is simple — and it's the reason why, much to my sadness, there will be no .boots-faubert TLD. ICANN is not making the service available in the same way as standard domain names. Rather than pay a set fee, hopeful owners of this new Internet real estate will have to pay to propose it — and then may be forced to win the TLD that they proposed in an auction. The folks at the .eco initiative need to build a war chest if they are going to obtain that TLD, and that;s why they have created their website and started their PR and fundraising campaigns.

There is a $185,000 to apply for a new TLD, and costs spiral up from there, culminating in auction bids, if competition emerges.

I am willing to bet that .cola and .music, not to mention .game, are going to go for some serious coin, because they are certain to be auction-bound. Considering the inherent value to a domain like .game — after all every video game company in the world will be lining up to be your dedicated and addicted customer — those domains will be the equivalent of a license to print money.

C.M. Boots-Faubert is a freelance writer who lives in Falmouth.

You can reach him at chris@boots-faubert.com.

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